The present invention relates to a print system including client devices connected to a print control device, that controls print processes based on print data, and also relates to a memory medium storing a print control program for controlling the print processes.
Widely used conventional print systems include a plurality of client devices connected by a network to a network printer. The client devices prepare and transmit a plurality of sets of print data (hereinafter referred to as “print data sets” or “print jobs”) to the printer, and the print data sets are stored by print job in a memory of the printer. The printer then prints out the print data sets by print job.
Because print data is stored in the memory of the printer, the user can reprint the print data without having to resend the print data from the client device to the printer. Because the memory of the printer can store a plurality of print data sets, the user needs to select a desired one of the plurality of print data sets stored in the memory of the printer. In order to enable the user to easily select a desired print data set, conventional print systems include a searching function for efficiently searching a print data set from all print data sets stored in the memory of the printer. In one example, a conventional printer reduces each print data set by a predetermined reduction rate and prepares a reduced print data set accordingly. The printer displays or prints out the reduced print data sets, so the user can select a desired print data set after visually confirming the contents of the print data sets.
However, the printer requires a certain amount of time to prepare such reduced print data. The burden placed on the printer is especially great, when the printer receives a large number of print data sets from client devices in a large print system. As a result, the reduced print data can take an extremely long time to prepare before the user can actually visually confirm the contents of the print data sets.
Although the amount of data can be reduced by increasing the reduction rate, the quality of the resultant display or printout will be poor, so the user will have difficulty in visually confirming the content of the print data sets.
There has been also known a conventional network printer including a reprint switch. When the reprint switch is pressed by a user, then the printer reprints out the last page of the print data set that was most recently stored in the memory of the printer.
Although these conventional printers can reprint all pages of a selected print data set or the last page of the last stored print data set, they cannot reprint the particular page of a particular print data set, such as only table contents of a selected print data set. Accordingly, when a user desires to reprint only such a particular page of a print job, the user must either operate the printer to reprint all pages of the print job or resend only data for the particular page to the printer.